Friday 6th of January 2009 RPM version 4.6.0 was released. The primary focus on this release has been cleaning up the code-base to make it more maintainable and robust, and also more approachable to invite more community involvement. Code duplications, memory handling and various code pieces have been cleaned up. The local copies of system libraries like db4, lua, popt and libmagic were removed. New APIs have been established and dozens of old bugs have been fixed. A several obsolete features have been removed from the code base. There also have been a number of visible improvements. Some of the more notable include:
* Subpackages of architecture dependent packages can now be noarch. This allows to share language, documentation or data subpackages among different architectures. * Support for packages > 2GB (up to 64 bit sizes). Right now packaged files are still restricted to 4GB due to limitations of cpio. * Support for secure file checksums such as SHA256 and SHA512 as a replacement for MD5. * Improvements for package builders like better support for building packages as non root and better access to patches and sources in the spec files. Full release notes can be found at http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.6.0 For a more comprehensive explanation of the most important changes see http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.6.0#Compatibilitynotes We want to thank Mandriva Linux and the Fedora Project for their testing efforts of the 4.6.0 release candidates as parts of their distributions. The RPM development team _______________________________________________ Rpm-maint mailing list Rpm-maint@lists.rpm.org http://lists.rpm.org/mailman/listinfo/rpm-maint